


The Rest is Noise

by CharryWotter



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Gen, Ghost Ben Hargreeves, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Klaus Hargreeves Needs Help, Klaus can't handle Ben's death, Protective Diego Hargreeves, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:15:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24260428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharryWotter/pseuds/CharryWotter
Summary: Everything is too loud, invasive. The reporters never stop flashing their cameras, even though the children are all covered in blood. Everyone wants another hit.Or, Klaus can't cope with Ben's death and the ghosts and the trauma. So he falls apart.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves
Kudos: 91





	The Rest is Noise

**Author's Note:**

> Even though the children are canonically named before Ben's death, they're all referred to as their numbers in this story. Because in the end, that's all they are.

“Number Four! Number Four!” the reporters shout, as invasive as buzzing flies swarming around a corpse. Camera lights flash, and his siblings chatter and spit fabricated lies beside him on the stage. The energy in the room is high, manic, pulsating, and no one bothers to notice that he isn’t smiling like the others. “When did you first discover your powers? How has your father trained you to see the dead?”

And Four tries to answer, he really does, but he blinks and opens his mouth and is actually in his room in the mansion. Maybe the reporters never were there, or maybe Four never was.

Expectations loom eerily at him from the dark shadows of the old house, like they always do, and cold, sickly flowers bloom in Four’s lungs.

Is today another training day? Four always needs another opportunity to learn how to crush his withering humanity, more so than the others. He must have been the cause of one more failed mission. Disapproval is a stench that lays heavily in the air and settles on his skin.

The walls around him are molding, black rot freely crawling all over the bedroom. Unchecked fungi growth has the potential to cause breathing problems in a young boy, but then again, so do four impervious stone walls and a locked door.

Four is in his room.

Ding, ding. The bell signals breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The alarm signals a mission. A heartbeat signals life. What is he missing? Ding.

Trained animals at a three-ring circus. The crowd loves to laugh and gawk and speculate, but there is an unspoken rule to never pull back the curtain for fear of the ugly truth that runs the show. 

Pain, a deep, cold ache. Scratches run up his arms, blood beading in jagged lines. Probable causes include robbers, knives, ghosts, and his own fingernails.

Dear old Daddy would never lay a hand on him. He doesn’t need to, to make a mark.

Purpling bruises and a throbbing headache. Red eyes watering in the light, weak hands shaking.

Is it morning or night? 

Six is usually there waiting for him, but he isn’t here now. Adrenaline rushes, panic, panic, panic. The alarm is blaring, he thinks. Or maybe his mind is the one bombarding himself with the noise. His room is as silent as a tomb.

Four rushes to the closed door, expecting it to be locked, but still barely noticing when it clicks open, allowing him to escape out into the dimly lit prison hallway. He stumbles, collapses, hits the ground roughly.

The hallway is swimming around him in blurry waves and the rough carpet scrapes his exposed knees like stone. 

Training never ends, none of it ever will. He likes to think he has overcome his fears, except the drugs are the ones in charge, hastily patching melting bandages over festering wounds. He can’t remember if he took anything recently or if he’s finally sober. Were those small blue pills from this morning or last week?

Hands grasp at him. He curls away.

No, no, no, no, no.

Not the mausoleum again. They’re always in there, waiting for him, and they always end up following him out. They never leave him alone.

“What is your favorite aspect of the Umbrella Academy? What is your relationship with your siblings?”

Number Six still hasn’t come for him, because he couldn’t possibly be the one touching Four’s shoulder, even though Four knows he is. Four leans into the hand. Coldness.

Eyes snap open. Green meets brown.

Eyes closed.

No need to worry. Six has everything under control now, like always. Nothing has changed. 

“Where have you been, Four? It’s nearly five in the morning! Throwing away your life isn’t how you mourn someone!”

Angry words pick at his skin. He flinches to avoid them. The hand retracts and is replaced by skeletal anger, pulling and tearing at his flesh.

Everything is too loud, invasive. The reporters never stop flashing their cameras, even though the children are all covered in blood. Everyone wants another hit.

His finger finds a pool of drying blood on the carpet and he sloppily smears a smiley face on the cheek of the ghost closest to him. It’s not Six, because Six is alive and away and asleep in his room. Right? 

Eyes peek open again to confirm. Shut rapidly, squeezed tightly. He rolls onto his side and pounds at the mausoleum door. His knuckle bones shatter against the unforgiving stone and his daddy is yelling at him and the ghosts are screaming and everything hurts so, so badly, and he gasps and finds himself back in the hallway.

Six won’t leave him alone, but the situation feels so wrong. 

A heaving corpse, torso shredded apart by its own demons and fingers clutching for comfort that isn’t there. A letdown, a disappointment, already forgotten by everyone.

The smiling statue sits outside in the courtyard. Four can imagine its unseeing eyes, gazing down at nothing in eternal judgement. Gone too soon. 

The ghosts reach for him and the mission alarm blares and the bell rings for breakfast and life goes on and Four screams.

Feet pounding on pavement, breath coming in short gasps in frigid morning air. Drinking with a burning throat and not stopping until up is down and the ghosts can’t find him. Dry swallowing any pills he can get his hands on. Laughing through his hysterical sobbing, because out of all of them, why were the most innocent always the ones to go first? 

It hasn’t been a year since Five disappeared, and everything is fracturing, shattering, and Four is tearing his skin open trying to pick up the pieces.

A countdown, down to one, down to the end.

The media has been anticipating it since the beginning, and the reporters fall on the story like rabid dogs, hungrily examining and analyzing new tears in the fabric, with no regard or sympathy for the mourning children underneath the masks.

“Where have you been?” Six asks him, kneeling worriedly there in the dark hallway, with no shadow, no breath, no heartbeat, and Four wants to rage at him like a spirit, and swear or shout or take another drink.

Instead, tears slip out of his eyes and slide down his whimpering throat.

He reaches out to touch what isn’t there, rejects this hallucination, drinks his alcohol and swallows his pills and staggers around on numb feet through the dark streets. Climbs into his bed and stumbles out of his room, but this already happened and he is still laying in the middle of the dark hallway crying in front of Six and he can’t deal with this, not right now.

Then Two materializes, with firm hands and a rough grip, and Four is dragged into Two’s room and shoved onto the bed.

“Talk to me,” is all Two says.

And Four does.


End file.
